Carbon Fiber – Material Table – Application – Price

About Carbon Fiber

Carbon fiber is a polymer that is is a very strong material that is also very lightweight. Carbon fibers have several advantages including high stiffness, high tensile strength, low weight, high chemical resistance, high temperature tolerance and low thermal expansion. Carbon fiber is five-times stronger than steel and twice as stiff. Though carbon fiber is stronger and stiffer than steel, it is lighter than steel; making it the ideal manufacturing material for many parts. Carbon fibers are usually combined with other materials to form a composite.

Summary

Name	Carbon Fiber
Phase at STP	solid
Density	2000 kg/m3
Ultimate Tensile Strength	4000 MPa
Yield Strength	2500 MPa
Young’s Modulus of Elasticity	500 GPa
Brinell Hardness	N/A
Melting Point	3657 °C
Thermal Conductivity	100 W/mK
Heat Capacity	800 J/g K
Price	22 $/kg

Composition of Carbon Fiber

To produce a carbon fiber, the carbon atoms are bonded together in crystals that are more or less aligned parallel to the long axis of the fiber as the crystal alignment gives the fiber high strength-to-volume ratio (in other words, it is strong for its size). Several thousand carbon fibers are bundled together to form a tow, which may be used by itself or woven into a fabric.

Applications of Carbon Fiber

Carbon fiber is most notably used to reinforce composite materials, particularly the class of materials known as carbon fiber or graphite reinforced polymers. Carbon fiber can have higher cost than other materials which has been one of the limiting factors of adoption. In a comparison between steel and carbon fiber materials for automotive materials, carbon fiber may be 10-12x more expensive. The increasing use of carbon fiber composites is displacing aluminum from aerospace applications in favor of other metals because of galvanic corrosion issues.

Mechanical Properties of Carbon Fiber

Strength of Carbon Fiber

In mechanics of materials, the strength of a material is its ability to withstand an applied load without failure or plastic deformation. Strength of materials basically considers the relationship between the external loads applied to a material and the resulting deformation or change in material dimensions. In designing structures and machines, it is important to consider these factors, in order that the material selected will have adequate strength to resist applied loads or forces and retain its original shape.

Strength of a material is its ability to withstand this applied load without failure or plastic deformation. For tensile stress, the capacity of a material or structure to withstand loads tending to elongate is known as ultimate tensile strength (UTS). Yield strength or yield stress is the material property defined as the stress at which a material begins to deform plastically whereas yield point is the point where nonlinear (elastic + plastic) deformation begins. In case of tensional stress of a uniform bar (stress-strain curve), the Hooke’s law describes behaviour of a bar in the elastic region. The Young’s modulus of elasticity is the elastic modulus for tensile and compressive stress in the linear elasticity regime of a uniaxial deformation and is usually assessed by tensile tests.

See also: Strength of Materials

Ultimate Tensile Strength of Carbon Fiber

Ultimate tensile strength of Carbon Fibre is 4000 MPa.

Yield Strength of Carbon Fiber

Yield strength of Carbon Fibre is 2500 MPa.

Modulus of Elasticity of Carbon Fiber

The Young’s modulus of elasticity of Carbon Fibre is 500 MPa.

Hardness of Carbon Fiber

In materials science, hardness is the ability to withstand surface indentation (localized plastic deformation) and scratching. Brinell hardness test is one of indentation hardness tests, that has been developed for hardness testing. In Brinell tests, a hard, spherical indenter is forced under a specific load into the surface of the metal to be tested.

The Brinell hardness number (HB) is the load divided by the surface area of the indentation. The diameter of the impression is measured with a microscope with a superimposed scale. The Brinell hardness number is computed from the equation:

Brinell hardness of Carbon Fiber is approximately N/A.

See also: Hardness of Materials

Thermal Properties of Carbon Fiber

Carbon Fiber – Melting Point

Melting point of Carbon Fiber is 3657 °C.

Note that, these points are associated with the standard atmospheric pressure. In general, melting is a phase change of a substance from the solid to the liquid phase. The melting point of a substance is the temperature at which this phase change occurs. The melting point also defines a condition in which the solid and liquid can exist in equilibrium. For various chemical compounds and alloys, it is difficult to define the melting point, since they are usually a mixture of various chemical elements.

Carbon Fiber – Thermal Conductivity

Thermal conductivity of Carbon Fiber is 100 W/(m·K).

The heat transfer characteristics of a solid material are measured by a property called the thermal conductivity, k (or λ), measured in W/m.K. It is a measure of a substance’s ability to transfer heat through a material by conduction. Note that Fourier’s law applies for all matter, regardless of its state (solid, liquid, or gas), therefore, it is also defined for liquids and gases.

The thermal conductivity of most liquids and solids varies with temperature. For vapors, it also depends upon pressure. In general:

Most materials are very nearly homogeneous, therefore we can usually write k = k (T). Similar definitions are associated with thermal conductivities in the y- and z-directions (ky, kz), but for an isotropic material the thermal conductivity is independent of the direction of transfer, kx = ky = kz = k.

Carbon Fiber – Specific Heat

Specific heat of Carbon Fiber is 800 J/g K.

Specific heat, or specific heat capacity, is a property related to internal energy that is very important in thermodynamics. The intensive properties c_v and c_p are defined for pure, simple compressible substances as partial derivatives of the internal energy u(T, v) and enthalpy h(T, p), respectively:

where the subscripts v and p denote the variables held fixed during differentiation. The properties c_v and c_p are referred to as specific heats (or heat capacities) because under certain special conditions they relate the temperature change of a system to the amount of energy added by heat transfer. Their SI units are J/kg K or J/mol K.

Properties and prices of other materials

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